- char_end
- 1191819
- char_start
- 1183965
- chunk_index
- 167
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- estimated_tokens
- 1964
- source_file_key
- moby-dick
- text
- under water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that
malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted
himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head
lengthwise beneath the boat.
Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for
an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of a
biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his
mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into
the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish
pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab’s
head, and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White Whale
now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With
unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the
tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other’s heads to gain the
uttermost stern.
And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the
whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his
body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from
the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and while
the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis
impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with
this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and
helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized
the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from
its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the
frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an
enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in
twain, and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the
two floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the
crew at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold
fast to the oars to lash them across.
At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first
to perceive the whale’s intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a
movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand had
made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only
slipping further into the whale’s mouth, and tilting over sideways as
it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him
out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the
sea.
Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little
distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the
billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body;
so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose—some twenty or more feet
out of the water—the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves,
dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray
still higher into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel
billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to
overleap its summit with their scud.
*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its
designation (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary
up-and-down poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called
pitchpoling, previously described. By this motion the whale must best
and most comprehensively view whatever objects may be encircling him.
But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round
and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful
wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly
assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the
blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus’s elephants in the
book of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the
whale’s insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,—though he
could still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that;
helpless Ahab’s head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least
chance shock might burst. From the boat’s fragmentary stern, Fedallah
incuriously and mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other
drifting end, could not succor him; more than enough was it for them to
look to themselves. For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale’s
aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made,
that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other
boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into
the eddy to strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant
destruction of the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that
case could they themselves hope to escape. With straining eyes, then,
they remained on the outer edge of the direful zone, whose centre had
now become the old man’s head.
Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship’s
mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene;
and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!—“Sail on
the”—but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and
whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing
to rise on a towering crest, he shouted,—“Sail on the whale!—Drive him
off!”
The Pequod’s prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle,
she effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly
swam off, the boats flew to the rescue.
Dragged into Stubb’s boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white
brine caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab’s bodily
strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom: for a
time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb’s boat, like one trodden
under foot of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from
him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.
But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more
abbreviate it. In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes condense
to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused
through feebler men’s whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary
in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time
aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous
intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures
contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.
“The harpoon,” said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on
one bended arm—“is it safe?”
“Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it,” said Stubb, showing it.
“Lay it before me;—any missing men?”
“One, two, three, four, five;—there were five oars, sir, and here are
five men.”
“That’s good.—Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there!
there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!—Hands off from me!
The eternal sap runs up in Ahab’s bones again! Set the sail; out oars;
the helm!”
It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked
up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is
thus continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now.
But the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the
whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with
a velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these
circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely
prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long
a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing
barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself,
then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate
means of overtaking the chase.